An appeals court doubled the sentence of a woman burglar who claimed to have just popped into a house to use the toilet while driving by.
Owners of the house came home one night in 2006 to find the burglar inside. They chased her down and held her till police came. Her accomplice managed to escape with a handbag, a mobile phone, a passport, sexy lingerie and jewelery.
The burglar claimed until the end that there had been a misunderstanding. She said she had simply seen the door open while driving by and taken the opportunity to use the toilet. She had a hard time explaining why there were tools strewn behind her as she hastily left the house, as well as suspicious paraphernalia in her car. Some of the claimed innocent tools were: a crowbar, a glass cutter, gloves and screwdrivers.
The appeals judge overturned the light one year suspended sentence, condemning the woman to two years inside.

A Brussels resident called the emergency services after he had one too many drinks and proceeded to beat up the two officers that showed up on his doorstep. The policemen were taken to hospital and will be on injury leave for at least three weeks, while the offender – who never gave a reason for his act – was charged with inflicting serious bodily harm on law enforcement agents.

A drunk driver managed to get caught twice on the night from Saturday to Sunday by police near Grobbendonk in the province of Antwerp. After the offender was stopped the first time and had a positive breathalyzer test, police removed his driving license. As soon as the control patrol left, the man got back behind the wheel and sped off, only to be intercepted again an hour and a half later at Herentals – by the same officers who failed to see the comic side of the situation and decided to confiscate his vehicle.

Kidney specialist and urologist Johan Vande Walle has hit on the solution to children who refuse to go to the toilet in school because it's so filthy — don't keep the lavatory at home too clean, so they won't be so struck by the contrast. Writing in Klasse magazine, Vande Walle advises parents not to make their toilets too luxurious. Children often avoid school toilets, leading to constipation and bladder problems, and causing them to stop drinking too, which leads to dehydration.

The Brussels police officer who was caught on camera stealing porn magazines from a shop that had just been burgled received a withheld sentence. Frédéric Feyaerts, 35, an officer with the Brussels-Ixelles/Elsene police, responded with a colleague to a burglary at a newsagents where he was caught on CCTV riffling through the till and slipping porn magazines under his jumper.

Read the story and watch the video here.

Withholding sentence means that the offender is found guilty in principle, but that the court hasn't quite said it yet. This means that the officer won't get any punishment, including a criminal record meaning that he can stay in his job – unless he re-offends in the next five years.

The incident caused uproar in the press last autumn after the owner of the shop leaked the video images on finding out that the officer had simply been moved across town. In the days after the revelation, the already embattled chief of Brussels' police Guido Van Wymersch flip-flopped in the response, attempting to explain what looked like a cover-up. His arguments went from: that suspending the officer pending investigation would mean that he would sit at home on full pay and that it was better to have him on the beat; to avoiding setting a precedent which would put half the force out of commission if all complaints resulted in a suspension; to Brussels police already having a bad reputation which didn't need to be tarnished any more. After two days of bungling, Wymersch decided to suspend the officer anyway as he had now, officially, received a copy of the tape, which he didn't have before.

The judge in the case ruled that Feyaerts had already shown enough remorse and compensated the shop keeper many times over. The incident was put down to a badly judged boy's prank, which shouldn't affect the officers career.